My Buy Essay

So, you have decided to market on the internet. You researched the market. You waded through all the technical jargon of how to make a website. You registered your domain. You set up your auto responder, now you need to find some ebook to give away so that you can build up your mailing list. This is the point where many newbies are bound to make a critical mistake. You have just spent a good amount of money for all the setting up of your website. The next month’s bills are already on the horizon if not upon you. The pressure is great to get some sales going. The temptation is now is to just grab any old ebook to give away as an offer to your visitors in return for their email address. Do not do it!!!

Look at it this way. Do you introduce yourself with a smile or with a frown? Giving away something of little or no value to your visitors is a frown. No matter how good your product is, most people are not going to buy until about the seventh contact with you. If their first impression of you is negative, you can kiss their business goodbye.

I am talking from personal experience. I recently came upon a really cool website. The owner of this site offered a free newsletter. I signed up not thinking much about it. At that point in time I was considering creating an ebook in PDF format. My problem was that I did not have $300 to spend on a PDF writing program. The first free newsletter arrived from the “cool website”. Well that was my lucky day. In the newsletter this guy gave me a fantastic tip. He showed me how to create a PDF ebook with totally free software. Just one little insight contained in a free newsletter saved me 300 bucks, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. Don’t you think that I will now feel that this guy is worth my trust? Well here is how much I trust him because he over delivered on what he promised. I am writing this article because he told me to.

The moral of the story: Deliver more than you promise, it will translate in trust, good will and most importantly, more sales.

.makebucksonline.com

What I’m about to explain to you will change to way you do your online marketing Today, Tomorrow and Years to come with little effort on your part.

This simple But effective technique involves the use of a ‘Pop-Up’ on your website, but, the difference between this technique and just a standard ‘Pop-Up’ or ‘Exit Pop-Up’ as we all see them is that when your potential prospects see them they are more then willing to give you there Name and Email address.

Why you ask?

Because your offering them something of Value for FREE.

As you well know the word ‘Free’ is one of the most Powerful words on the internet when used correctly and when combined with an ‘Pop-Up’… it could make you alot of extra money with little effort.

As a marketer myself, a simple Name and Email Address is worth hundreds, if not thousands of extra dollars a year if I collect and follow-up my leads properly, but, the questions that always seem to arise are…

…How do I do it? …What steps do I need to take?

So… now that I have your attention, let me explain to you how this can be achieved in a simple ‘Step-By-Step’ fashion.

Step #1:

What do you have that you can give away to your visitors as they leave your website that is of value to your visitor and more importantly, will benefit from?(Here’s a hint… Free Reports, eBooks, eCourses, etc.)

(Note: Give away brandable ebooks, reports, etc. with your affiliate links embedded within them. Make sure they’re related to the subject of the content.)

Step #2:

Once you’ve figured out what your going to give away, put together some ad copy for your ‘Pop-Up’ that your going to build that will grab your visitors attention and get them to sign-up for your ‘Free Offer’ or ‘Give Away’ as they leave your website.

(Note: You don’t have write alot, just a few attention grabbing sentences pointing out the ‘Benefits’ of your offer.)

Step #3:

Write a short Solo. You need this because after they sign-up through your web-form from your pop-up, this is what they will receive in there Inbox with either download info or other instructions that you specify in order for them to receive there Report, eBook, eCourse, etc.

(Note: Also, make sure you attach a ‘Signature File’ at the end of your Solo. Many marketer’s forget this part and are losing out on alot of extra profits. Don’t Forget!)

Step #4:

You need to go to your ‘Auto-responder’ management console and set-up an seperate auto-responder with the solo you wrote for your ‘Free Offer’ and/or ‘Give Away’.

Once you’ve set your auto-responder its now time for you to copy the HTML code for your auto-responder’s Web-Form and paste it into the ‘Pop-Up’ you just put together.

(Note: Auto-responder services may very. Simply follow there directions.)

Step #5:

This is the easy part, once you have completed all of the other steps, simply paste your ‘Pop-Up’ code into your desired webpage(s).

If you use pop-up software that creates and automatically inserts the code for you simply select the webpage you want the code to be placed on and the software will do the rest.

Now simply upload your newly formatted webpage and pop-up to your host and start sending it Traffic!

As a general rule, test out your pop-up for your first week a see how it pulling. You may need to tweek it if its not performing to your stardards. All it takes is just a few words to be changed to make your pop-up a success.

That’s it… your Done!

These are the 5 basic steps needed to turn your website into an fully ‘Automated Sales Machine’ that will automatically follow-up your leads 24/7/365 without you lifting a finger.

It may take a little time to set-up initially, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Now, I just have one last tip for you.

If you really want to get the most out of your Pop-Up and the leads it brings in simply load-up your already set-up ‘Auto-Responder’ with 6 or 7(or however many you want) follow-up emails and set them to go out every 3 to 4 weeks.

For maximum results make sure that you target the particular Product or Service you are offering or promoting because it makes no sense to offer a Product or Service that doesn’t relate to what your initial offer was that they signed up for.

To have a successful Internet business, you need only three things:

1. Product

2. Copywriting

3. Traffic

It really is that simple. If you have those three things… competently performed, you will have a succesful, profitable Internet business. Let’s talk about competency in each of those three areas and how you can quickly master each one.

Product

You need a product that people want. Don’t fall in love with a product just because you think it’s cool. I’ll go into details in a future article, but I look at two things to determine if a product is wanted enough for me to sell it:

1. Are there people searching for that product (I use the Overture tool)

2. Are fellow marketers willing to pay a significant amount of money for traffic for that search term because people are buying (I also use the Overture tool).

I multiply those two numbers. If the result is higher than the result for the product “air guns”, I’m willing to get into that market. Why “air guns”? It was simply my first profitable product. Can products that score lower than “air guns” be profitable? I’m sure they can, but there are enough markets that score higher than “air guns”, I’m not willing to chance it.

BTW, don’t get too hung up on the product. It is the least important of the three items. Copywriting and traffic are infinitely more important to your business. Don’t spend two years developing a product. There are already thousands of products available on the Internet that you can market and earn a percentage as an affiliate. Choosing your product should take no longer than a half an hour, not two years. You can run the numbers for 6-10 product ideas in less than half an hour and make your decision. Then start concentrating on what really matters… which is…

Copywriting

Now you need to describe your product. You will do this in many ways. You will create a sales page on a web-site that will describe the product and try to sell it. You will write small text ads to run on PPC search engines. You will write similar one and two line descriptions to enter into affiliate networks. You will write articles and resource boxes for those articles. You may even write a signature line for use on forums.

The point is that copywriting is what conveys the message about your product. It is simply some words. You can sometimes uses pictures and videos, but it is generally the words that actually do the selling. Don’t forget that you are in the business of words.

How do you decide what words to use? You have three choices if you are a beginner:

1. Hire a high priced copywriter. Generally you will want to pay $5,000-$10,000 per sales page for a decent copywriter. Drop me a note if you want referrals. I know two of the best.

2. Use copywriting software that scores words. I recommend Glyphius which you can read more about at Glyphius.com. It scores your prospective ad copy against a massive database of profitable ads. You can simply make up some copy and click the score button. Then change it and click the score button again. Pick the highest scoring text after you have worked with it for awhile. You’ll have copy that the pros will envy and more importantly… copy that will convert that traffic into customers.

3. Fail for a long time while you are learning. Don’t laugh. Most Internet marketers choose this path. If you are persisent enough, you will learn what works and what doesn’t.

Traffic

Once you have copy that sells, you need to get people to see it. We call that “traffic” on the Internet.

There are dozens of ways to get traffic on the Internet. Let me focus on two ways that I recommend to beginners because both are free (well; there is a small one-time cost to get started, but you don’t pay for each visitor like some other sources).

1. Search Engine Optimization - get free traffic from the search engines by being ranked high for the search terms associated with your product.

2. Article Submission - get recognition and links to your site by writing and submitting articles.

Let’s talk about Search Engine Optimization first. First of all, DO NOT waste weeks and months of your life listening to the lemmings on the SEO forums. In my experience, they are just the blind leading the blind. There are three factors to search engine optimization you should focus on:

a) Your domain and URLs

b) On page optimization

c) Links to your site

For the first, I recommend you choose your domain and URL structure using Nemeas. You can read about it at Nemeas.com. It is very simple to use and is also based on a massive statistical analysis of the leading search engine. You simply score prospective domains and URLs and select the highest scoring one.

I don’t recommend any on page optimization unless you are creating free content sites to feed traffic to your sales page. Instead, optimize your sales page for selling with Glyphius and don’t worry about the on page search engine factors.

For getting inbound links to your site, I recommend article submission. I recommend that you use Artemis Pro. You can read more about it at ArtemisPro.com. It gives you a boost above any other currently available article submission tool because it submits a unique article to each publisher. That boost can amount to an 1875% increase in effectiveness given the same amount of time invested.

At the end of each article, you should have a resource box with a link back to the site with your sales page. That resource box should be optimized with Glyphius.

That’s it. Running a successful, profitable Internet business is really just that simple. It’s just choosing the right product, choosing the right words for your copywriting and choosing the best way to get traffic to your sales page.

Please visit my blog often at .JamesBrausch.com for further lessons on the simplicity of Internet marketing. I’ll post regular lessons there. Every entry on my blog is categorized into three topic areas: Product, Copywriting and Traffic. Just choose one of the topics to find out more information about that area of running a successful Internet business.

Here’s to your success!

Affiliate advertising represents a massive opportunity to profit from your website, and with any profitable medium there will be people searching for methods of increasing their own slice of the pie by “playing the system”. Why take risks yourself with a product or service when programs such as Google Adsense enable you to profit from others desire to drive traffic and sales to their companies?

You may be tempted to simply create a website with the express intention of selling advertising space. This is a proven business method after all, free local newspapers and newsletters have been operating for years based entirely on advertising revenue and classifieds, and the majority of the worlds television stations can only stay in business by telling you about their sponsors and advertisers products.

The world wide web offers advertisers an low overheads, an unrivalled market reach all combined with a level of statistical feedback that traditional non-interactive media can only dream of. This makes online business extremely attractive but also extremely competitive. Advertisers need to find ways of raising awareness of their products and services against global competition. Maximising penetration in such a massive arena would take more resources than most companies can muster. Enter the affiliate marketeers.

You, as a website publisher become an affiliate by agreeing with companies that you will promote their product on your website. In return the advertisers will pay you for bringing traffic or sales to their website. The more traffic or converted sales you bring the more you will earn for your efforts. By the same measure the more traffic you bring to your own web pages the more you potentially stand to earn from your affiliates.

At this point many affiliate marketeers will disengage their brain, concentrating their efforts on bringing web surfers to their site in order to push them on to their affiliates. Often the webmasters of these sites will be well versed in search engine technology, understanding the core concepts of optimised site design, keyword targetting, external linking and content generation that will increase the “relevance” of their page in the indexes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is often the final, and tellingly the most time consuming of these techniques that will merit the least attention in the minds of professional web marketeers.

Often an amount of statistical analysis will take place to identify search trends and high paying affiliate industries that will potentially have the highest payout. A site will then be designed with search engine optimisation at the forefront, simple coding practices that will enable an algorithm to make a good attempt at cataloging the subject matter of the page and relate it to the identified keywords. Search engine experts are also well aware that sites which are updated frequently are treated as “more relevant” in the search engine index. This is a simple equation, if you are searching for information on MP3 players you want to be presented with content telling you about the features of the latest iPod and reviewing the new competing models. You aren’t interested in reviews of a 5 year old device with the ergonomics and storage capacity of a housebrick.

In their rush for content a number of affiliate marketeers will turn to external sources, be it in the form of user generated content or “article directories”. Both can be useful tools for time-challenged webmasters, and particularly in the case of article directories which take the form of free to publish text on almost any subject imaginable. Simply search for an article on your particular subject of choice, paste it into you template, upload it to your site and wait for the search engines to pick it up. Hey presto you are instantly a more relevant site and bumping yourself up the Google results while still leaving yourself time to spend your hard earned affiliate money at the pub.

So far so good but don’t forget the wisdom of your parents generation, “buyer beware” and “you get what you pay for”. Well if you are paying nothing more than a tiny fraction of your internet bill for these articles then you might want to consider the motives of the author of that lovely keyword rich article you just found.

The fact is there are many valuable articles in directories such as EZineArticles and ZapContent.com, but the mistake many webmasters make in their rush for search engine optimised content it that they don’t read, and I mean really read the text that they are merrily pasting into their site. Before hitting ctrl-c ask yourself “does this content really benefit my readers”. The chances are the best content from these services will find itself syndicated across a number of sites, or the information will be republished in differing forms. As people use their search engines to find information they will look at a number of websites and will soon realise which content has been regurgitated ad-nausium. Net result is if their first impression of your site is one that offers the same old information they won’t bother coming back.

Even worse, a number of prolific authors have an ulterior motive. They are simply trying to boost their own search relevance by increasing the number of backlinks to their own websites. If an article you find is borderline check the authors history. If they have submitted hundreds of pages of almost identical content stuffed to the gills with the same keywords the chances are they are simply link-spamming. They don’t care if you publish their content or not, each page in the directory linking back to their website in order to boost their page rank. Would your readers really be interested in such sloppy content? I’m sure mine wouldn’t.

This takes us neatly onto the key message. Why do people return to a website and hopefully trust their sponsors? Because the site has personality, your readers should be able to identify with your informational pages, hopefully they will book mark your page, even tell others to read it. Repeat visitors are far more likely to finally visit your sponsors than those who find your page once and then head back to their search engine of choice. By all means use relevant articles but never compromise your content by relying too much on third party content.

But aside from the human element there is a far more serious reason for ensuring your content is the best, and most original it can be and that is the nature of search engines. Companies such as Google know that their market position is based entirely on trust in their organic results. Expect their search algorithms in future to be tweaked against certain types of syndicated content in order to give the (perceived) best service to their searchers. Spending time now on good quality, original and easily updated content could save you time in the long run as you avoid spending time chasing your page rankings against ever more sophisticated relevance algorithms.

Online shopping is the latest trend among customers. Why would you still go to the shop personally when you can do shopping from the comforts of your own home? Because of the rising popularity of online shopping, more and more business persons are setting up their own ecommerce websites to meet the needs of customers and of course, earn big money online.

There is a very bright future for ecommerce websites. As long as there are needs that should be met, there will be customers. For ecommerce website owners, earning money online can be so easy. If people need your products and services, your website will stay alive as long as you want.

Online Competition For Ecommerce Websites

Because of the increasing numbers of online shoppers, there is a need for more ecommerce websites. The problem, however, is that there seem to be several ecommerce websites now. A lot of business persons have answered the call to sell something online. This makes online competition very tough.

Just think about this, if you sell health and beauty products online, there are hundred more several websites like yours. They also offer the same products and services. If there is one customer looking for a health product, he has a hundred choices to choose from. So how can you increase your website’s chance of getting that customer?

Plan Ahead And Market Your Ecommerce Website

This is one thing that most ecommerce website owners do not completely understand. Most of them think that once they have set up their websites, they don’t have to do anything anymore. They will just sit and wait for sales. This may be true ages ago, but with the tough competition now, if you don’t do anything, you won’t get any sales.

Ecommerce websites need two things to consider. First is planning and the second is marketing. Before setting up the website, there must be a thorough planning first. In planning, you must consider the target market, budget, design and other factors that will affect the overall performance of the website.

Second is website marketing. After you have set up your website, you need to work on a marketing campaign. Through marketing, you can make your website more popular and visible to your target market. There are several web marketing options which you can use. The choice of the web marketing option depends on the need of your website.

Remember not to stop working on your website after the set up. If you stop working on it, the sales will also stop. Continually market your website for continuous sales.